The Miliband Family

At the origin of the lineage is the damp pavement of a Jewish quarter in Warsaw. Family narratives and biographies agree: the parents of Ralph Miliband had grown up in the impoverished Jewish quarter of Warsaw, in Poland, and were, in the early 1920s, among those Polish Jews who migrated westward, to Brussels in Belgium. This quarter — the Jewish Warsaw of before the Shoah, one of the largest Jewish concentrations in Europe — is the soil from which everything springs.

The memory of this community extends moreover beyond the immediate circle of direct ancestors. A testimony gathered in the British press recalls that the roots of the family, like those of the Miliband brothers, run deep into the Warsaw Jewish community of the nineteenth century; a Polish Jewish father, David Miliband, left Warsaw for Moscow in the early twentieth century — a moment when the different branches of the family took separate paths. Thus, even before the exile to Brussels, the name Miliband was already dispersing itself between the West and the East, between Brussels and Moscow: it is the very law of double diaspora, this dispersion within dispersion that Jewish cultural production has never ceased to meditate upon.

From this Warsaw matrix, the lineage inherits a decisive fact: belonging to a working-class and popular Jewish world, steeped in the great emancipatory hopes that traversed Eastern European Jewry at that time. It was not in the talmudic academies, but in workshops and activist circles that the ethics of this family were forged — an ethics that was to make of tzedaka, justice owed to the weak, not charity but a political imperative.

It is in Belgium that the following thread unfolds. Biographical sources establish that Ralph's parents met and married, his father Samuel (1895-1966) being a skilled craftsman. His father's profession is attested with precision: Sam Miliband, former member of the Red Army, had left Poland after the First World War and became a leather worker in Belgium. Leather work — a trade of patience and hands, the dignity of the craftsman — situates the family within that laboring Jewish class whose survival depended on know-how.

It is in this Brussels of immigrants that is born, on January 7, 1924, the one who would carry the name of the lineage to fame: Adolphe Miliband, born in Brussels on January 7, 1924, of Polish Jewish parents, who would later take the first name of Ralph. The family biography specifies the father's activist memory: Samuel Miliband was part of a socialist Jewish group in Warsaw; after the First World War, in 1922, his parents settled in Brussels, Belgium, met and married in 1923.

The father's socialist commitment is not a detail: it inscribes the family within that Jewish tradition of involvement in collective life, where concern for the common good and equality extends, in secular language, the ancient commandment not to remain indifferent to the distress of others. The Jewish modernity of Eastern Europe precisely saw the birth of these new figures, where the fervor inherited from the religious world was transmuted into political hope — a mutation that the historiography of modern Judaism has studied at length.

The year 1940 splits the lineage in two like a cleaver. The German invasion transforms the Belgian refuge into a trap. The sources are unequivocal: the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 divided the Miliband family in two: Ralph and his father Samuel fled to England, while Ralph's mother Renée and his younger sister Nan remained in place for the duration of the occupation. Father and son crossed the Channel; mother and daughter remained in a Europe now under the Nazi boot.

Ralph was then sixteen years old. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1940, he arrived in Great Britain at the age of sixteen and subsequently served in the Royal Navy. This young stateless refugee, who did not yet speak English, was to wear the uniform of the country that had welcomed him and fight for it: a gesture in which the entire particular relationship of this lineage to war is read — not the war of conquest, but that waged for survival and against barbarism.

The separation of 1940 is the founding wound. It speaks the Jewish experience par excellence: the family dispersed by the violence of History, some saved, others exposed. That Renée and Nan traversed the years of occupation in Nazi Belgium points back to this history of Jewish responses to persecution — concealment, endurance, silent resistance — that research has documented for so many communities across the centuries. The name Miliband thus inscribes itself, at its date, in the long memory of the persecutions and survivals of Israel.

The sixteen-year-old refugee became one of the most widely read Marxist theorists of his time. Born Adolphe Miliband on January 7, 1924 in Brussels, died May 21, 1994 in London, he was a Polish citizen until 1948 then British. His intellectual formation took place at the London School of Economics, where his thesis director was Harold Laski, and where his major influences were Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills. Laski, himself from Anglo-Mancunian Judaism, was for this young exile both a master and a guide.

Ralph Miliband's work forms a coherent body, three major landmarks of which are preserved in the corpus. In 1961 came Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour [corpus 888d5136], a critical analysis of British social democracy and its compromises. In 1969, The State in Capitalist Society [corpus 6a854743] delivered his most influential contribution: a theory of the State as an instrument of dominant classes, which would fuel the famous theoretical debate with Nicos Poulantzas. In 1977, Marxism and Politics [corpus 1bf421e4] deepened his reflection on political action and paths to emancipation. His university career was established: Miliband remained at the LSE until 1972, the year he was appointed professor of politics at the University of Leeds.

All this work is traversed by a passion: justice. The son of the leather worker from Brussels made the condition of the dominated the central object of his science. In this, never claiming the synagogue, Ralph Miliband extended an immemorial motif of Jewish consciousness — the prophetic demand for social justice, the refusal of indifference before inequality. European Jewish modernity saw many sons of the tradition thus translate ethical heritage into secular critical thought. His reserve toward power, his refusal of official positions and honors, also express a form of humility and intellectual integrity that echoes the virtues that Judaism has always praised in its masters.

The lineage is doubled through marriage. By marrying Marion Kozak, Ralph united two trajectories of Polish Jewish exile. The sources attest to it: David Miliband, born in London, is the eldest son of Jewish immigrants — the Marxist born in Belgium Ralph Miliband and Marion Kozak, who came from Poland; he declared: "I am the child of Jewish immigrants and it is a very important part of my identity". The account of their meeting is also documented: born in Belgium, Ralph met another Jewish refugee upon his arrival in Great Britain — Marion Kozak, who came from Poland and escaped at the beginning of the Nazi occupation.

Marion Kozak, a survivor of persecution, embodies that part of the lineage where the memory of the Shoah becomes active. An activist committed to the causes of justice and peace, she transmitted to her sons an acute awareness of what it means to be "the child of immigrants". This assumed identity — claimed by David Miliband as an essential part of himself — is the place where transmitted tradition and established fact answer each other: the feeling of being an outsider, a stranger whose place is never entirely secure, which Ed Miliband himself evoked regarding his Jewish heritage.

This relationship to the stranger — remembering that one was oneself a stranger, and making it an ethic of welcome — constitutes one of the most repeated commandments of the Jewish tradition. The Miliband lineage, born of migration and flight, will have made it a constitutive feature of its identity. It is in this shared experience of uprootedness that the family joins the collective memory of Israel, a people of wandering and hospitality.

The third generation bore the name Miliband at the very heart of British power — a singular achievement for the grandsons of a stateless refugee. David and Ed, sons of Ralph and Marion, both committed themselves to public life, embodying that civic engagement which has run through the lineage since their socialist father from Warsaw.

Ed Miliband knew the most visible trajectory at the head of his party. After the Labour defeat in the 2010 general election, he spectacularly defeated his brother David to win the leadership of the Labour Party; in 2015, he in turn led his party to defeat against David Cameron's conservatives. The rest of his career is also established: he did not sit in the front rank under Jeremy Corbyn, but returned in 2020 to senior responsibilities. His father came from a world that could not have imagined a Miliband ever leading a great governing party.

David, the elder, pursued a parallel career at the top of the state before devoting himself to humanitarian work. His commitment to serving refugees — a cause he made his own in the second half of his life — gives the family history a profound resonance: the grandson of the 1940 refugee working for those whom war today drives onto the roads. The claim he made publicly of his identity — "I am the child of Jewish immigrants and it is a very important part of my identity" — explicitly ties personal destiny to the memory of a people.

In these two figures, the virtue of community engagement, public service and care for the other finds its secular fulfilment. The family that, in Warsaw, belonged to the humble Jewish people of the workshops, now stands among those who make the laws and succour the exiled — without ever forgetting, by their own word, where they come from.

In three generations, the Miliband lineage will have traversed the distance separating Warsaw's impoverished Jewish quarter from the benches of Westminster Parliament. Between the two: Brussels and its leather workshop, the rupture of May 1940, the English Channel crossed by a stateless adolescent, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics, and the building of a work of thought. It is the striking shorthand of an entire Jewish century, from persecution to reconstruction, from exile to rootedness.

This family did not bequeath responsa or commentaries on the Law. What it expressed best, among all virtues, is justice — tzedek made conscience and action. From the socialist father of Warsaw to Ralph the theorist of the State, from the survivor Marion to sons engaged in civic life and in service to refugees, one same thread runs through: the refusal of indifference before the condition of the weak and the dominated. This passion for justice, the Jewish tradition has carried it since the prophets; the Milbands translated it into the secular language of political thought and public action.

To this cardinal virtue are added, inseparably, the memory of the foreigner one once was — transformed into welcome for the exiled — and the humility of a family which, having reached the heights, never denied the Brussels workshop or the pavement of Warsaw. In this, the Miliband lineage, brief though its inscription in the archives may be, fully partakes of the collective memory of Israel: that of a people which, from dispersion to dispersion, has made justice and fidelity to its origins the beating heart of its transmission.